Working from home can be tough at times, but creating an inviting and functional space can make it much easier. In designing your home office you need to look at how much space you have to work with. Do you need to share the space? Is it a multi-functioning space? What furniture do you have, what storage do you have? What will you need to purchase (or shop from your own home)? Many thoughts and ideas come into play when carving out a space for working at home. This Friday’s post is about where to find inspiration for your planning and where to go from there.

Once you have a space planned out in your mind and have done an inventory of the furnishings and organizational tools you already have, it’s time to find some inspiration. Grab your favorite design magazines and pop on over to Pinterest or some of your favorite design blogs and see what’s out there. Find out what’s working for others and even what’s not working – or what you know won’t work for you. I would love a white and bright office with lots of open and clean storage. I have a great big black brown IKEA shelving unit and desk. I really need to use what I have at this point, so those ideas won’t work exactly for me. But I can still get lots of other ideas from all of those images that I have pinned to my boards in Pinterest. You need to look beyond the overall image and see what little things you can take or build off of for yourself. Grab some paper and really start mapping things out for your space. What functions need to happen in the space? Are you sharing the space with others? What different zones need to happen? (For me, I’m using my office for Carrie Owens Photography stuff, general family organization as well as memory keeping and Project Life and even some Lego storage of my favorite sets)

5 steps to start planning your home office

1 | take an inventory of what zones you need in the space (including if you’re sharing this space with another function in the home)

2 | take an inventory of what furniture you have

3 | take an inventory of what storage and organizational tools you have

4 | gather inspiration from around the web, magazines and wherever you can find it

5 | start sketching…even if you think you can’t draw! Get some graph paper and map it out. Use bubbles to define your zones…whatever works for you, try getting it down on paper.

If you’re looking for more inspiration, check out my Pinterest Board all about “ideas for my home office”

Follow Carrie’s board ideas for my home office on Pinterest.

Are you on Pinterest? Looking for lots of inspiration? Follow all of my Pinterest Boards here.